Bastion: Selling trust to enterprises building on stablecoins

For large companies, choosing how to hold stablecoins leaves a broader question: who manages the regulatory, reputational and financial risks? Nassim Eddequiouaq, Co-founder and CEO of Bastion, joined Andres Monteoliva, Co-founder and CEO at Range, on Range Stablecoin Fireside to explain how those risks shape enterprise stablecoin infrastructure.

Nassim's career in security took him through Apple, Docker, Anchorage and Meta's stablecoin project. He built Bastion as the partner he wished Meta had: a regulated infrastructure provider that lets companies embed financial products without becoming financial institutions themselves. Bastion brings technology, compliance, operations and bank connectivity into one platform for payments, treasury management and stablecoin issuance. Customers can operate under Bastion's licenses or use it as a regulated partner while holding their own. Range addresses the controls these programs need. We start with a company's regulatory and reporting requirements, translate them into transaction controls, orchestrate its existing risk and compliance providers, and run monitoring, reconciliation and reporting from one record across stablecoins and fiat.

Selling trust: where enterprise risk sits

At Meta, Nassim watched a social network attempt to build a full financial institution: holding balances, enabling payments at scale and connecting to blockchains. He concluded that Meta should have partnered with a regulated company to handle those responsibilities behind the scenes. Other companies wanted the same arrangement, he said, so they could embed finance without making financial services their core business. Timing also mattered. After Libra Association members received letters from the previous administration, Nassim expected large enterprises to hesitate.

That experience shaped Bastion's decision to become a licensed platform. Nassim summed up the business: "we sell trust. And the way you build trust is by managing risks, especially for larger enterprises". Those risks extend beyond delayed access to funds or a broken API. They include financial exposure, reputational damage and regulators who expect to see everything happening in a company's systems.

In Nassim's example, if North Korea uses an application, the company behind it would be facilitating that activity whether its wallets are self-custodial or held by a regulated custodian. In Nassim's words, "those risks do not disappear with self custody. They do not disappear if you're just a technology provider." Nassim said Bastion manages regulatory and operational risk alongside the technology. Customers with their own licenses still gain a partner whose operations and people are screened and audited by regulators, he said. Nassim pointed to FTX as a reminder of how quickly things can go wrong without proper oversight.

For a company adding stablecoin features, the custody decision follows the risk assessment. Map regulatory, reputational and financial exposure first. Your company answers to regulators for its flows whether it holds the keys or a custodian does.

One partner, one compliance bar

Asked what matters most to the enterprises, banks and financial institutions working with Bastion, Nassim started with the effort of choosing a partner. "Those enterprises take many, many, many months, typically multiple years, to make a decision on a partner," he said, and few want to repeat that process for several providers. Multiple providers also complicate compliance. If their standards differ, the combined program effectively meets the lowest bar. As Nassim put it, "Your story and narrative and risk level is as weak as the weakest link." Bastion builds toward a consistent compliance and security standard across its platform.

That consistency still has to accommodate different products. Bastion has announced a partnership with Sony Bank, and Nassim said more companies are launching products on its platform. Some focus on treasury management and cross-entity money movement; others build global financial experiences. Even within the same use case, requirements vary for device security, two-factor authentication, policies and rewards distribution.

Key management shows why integration matters. Asked how he pitches Bastion's technology to bank committees, Nassim said he is surprised how knowledgeable people are about key management, all the way to executives: HSMs, secure enclaves, MPC and quorums. Not everyone can go deep enough to compare solutions, he added, so Bastion explains the risks of its approach and its competitors', and why its risks are lower for the customer's use case, then addresses integration. In his view, matching its platform would mean combining top-tier key management with transaction monitoring, investigation and case management. Nassim described Bastion as one system where "the key management and all the security kind of gets hidden in the background behind a fully compliant system."

When evaluating infrastructure, set a compliance and security standard for the whole program. Test every provider against it: the lowest standard in the stack sets your exposure.

Embedded finance moves first, treasury waits for liquidity

Asked which Bastion vertical would matter most over the next twelve months, Nassim picked payments and embedded finance. Product teams typically drive these decisions, adding financial features to increase revenue and stickiness, as Uber did with accounts and Apple with Apple Cash. Nassim described those teams as "less risk averse than the treasury teams that actually have more to lose than to win", so embedded finance moves faster.

Liquidity also favors smaller payments. A corridor can absorb consumer transactions more easily than large B2B payments, where a single transfer might consume most of the available stablecoin liquidity. That depth affects conversion prices and fees. Nassim called for more non-US dollar stablecoins, more onchain liquidity and more incentives to hold non-US dollar currencies.

For embedded finance, he said, demand already exists. People around the world want to receive and hold US dollars, earn rewards on them and use them to pay, trade and invest. He expects embedded finance to lead over the next twelve months, followed by treasury use cases as liquidity, support and integrations develop.

Before committing treasury or B2B volume, price conversions in each corridor at your actual transaction size. A rate available for consumer payments may not hold for a larger transfer.

Large clients and the cross-jurisdiction problem

Enterprise conversations now focus on implementation. In Nassim's words, "Conversations have shifted from the why to the how." That means working through incentives, technical structure and cross-jurisdictional rollouts. Bastion sometimes advises companies to drop parts of a strategy borrowed from another company's playbook. Larger clients also plan further ahead. Nassim said, "You're building products not just for the first iteration, but for the next five to ten years of iterations." That horizon brings strategy, risk and compliance work to the start of the process.

Cross-border operations add overlapping oversight. A large institution may launch in one jurisdiction while remaining accountable to a regulator elsewhere. As Nassim put it, "the regulators in jurisdiction b are still gonna have oversight in what they're doing in another country." Bastion started in the US, the origin of the dollar, securing money transmitter licenses and a New York trust charter. Nassim described this as clearing the highest bar first. Frameworks outside the US are usually at the same level or a little lower, he said, making global expansion easier.

Asked which GENIUS rules would matter most in daily operations, Nassim said he was watching reserve requirements, in particular whether they will limit concentration at a single financial institution. He used a hypothetical cap of 30 or 40 percent at any one bank to illustrate how holders could retain access to funds if a bank went down for an hour. He also flagged interoperability: Tether and others will continue issuing dollar stablecoins outside the US that are not GENIUS compliant. Nassim described the MiCA and GENIUS issuance requirements as mutually exclusive, saying one dollar stablecoin "cannot be at the same time compliant with MiCA and compliant with GENIUS, which is a real problem." He added that "Europe and others do not have any incentives to enable passporting of US dollars", and expects industry education and lobbying to produce outcomes that will probably differ by jurisdiction.

For a program operating across borders, map every regulator overseeing each entity, including the home regulator's reach abroad. Track reserves, custody and banking exposure by institution so you can show where funds sit and how concentrated they are.

Make stablecoins boring, and honest about fees

Nassim wants the industry to make stablecoins more boring. Asked what people get wrong, he argued that stablecoins receive too much attention as a shiny object. As Nassim put it, "That is a better form of money that stays money." He traced money from livestock to metal coins and dollar bills, then to entries in private ledgers and now open ledgers. Ideally, people would not need to know what makes up their balance on a platform. Stablecoins would sit in the background, used simply as money.

His other concern was the industry's understanding of payments and banking. Comparing a card transaction costing 50 cents or $2 with a stablecoin transfer costing a fraction of a cent leaves out what the card fee buys. Nassim called that comparison untrue: card payments carry regulatory compliance, consumer protections, refunds and coordinated incentives between both sides' providers. As he put it, "what we're optimizing for is not the $2. It might be 20¢, which is already a big, big win."

Promising fractions of a cent, he said, means giving up consumer protection laws, refunds and chargebacks. Large companies examine every line item in a transaction fee structure. Incorrect comparisons cost their trust; clear data can show where stablecoins improve the economics.

Build the business case around the full payment flow. Identify what current fees pay for, which protections and controls you need to rebuild, and what the stablecoin payment costs once those are in place.

Controls for programs that answer to several regulators

Enterprise stablecoin programs face overlapping regulatory oversight, banking relationships and procurement scrutiny. Range builds for those requirements. We start with what each regulator and auditor needs to see, translate those requirements into controls applied before money moves, orchestrate a company's existing risk and compliance providers, and run monitoring, reconciliation and reporting from one record across wallets, accounts and counterparties.

If you are building stablecoin products that more than one regulator will examine, talk to us: Request a sandbox

About Bastion

Bastion describes itself as trusted stablecoin infrastructure for enterprises. It gives companies a full stack to custody, move, convert and issue stablecoins, under Bastion's licenses or their own. Bastion Platforms Trust Company, LLC is chartered as a limited purpose trust company by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Learn more at bastion.com.

Want to appear on Range Stablecoin Fireside? If you are building with stablecoins and want a seat on the show, get in touch by email or on X.